Volume 42, Number 7 · April 20, 1995
Walden-on-Sea
By Jonathan Raban
In April 1895, when he sailed from Boston in a tubby home-made sloop on a solo voyage around the world, Joshua Slocum was fifty-one and on the run from his Furies. He was then barely on speaking terms with his second wife ('[My father] and Hettie did not pull on the same rope,' said Slocum's youngest son, Garfield). He was at the bitter—and litigious—end of his seagoing career. His one published book, The Voyage of the Liberdade (1890), had attracted little notice and almost no sales. If he had hoped to follow Dana and Melville into the ranks of seamen-turned-authors, he began from a position of huge disadvantage. His father had removed him from school when he was ten. His spelling and punctuation were stuck in the third grade. Later on, his letters to publishers would speak, unpromisingly, of 'litterary production,' of his mind being 'deffinately fixed' on his 'voyoage.'[*]
Feature, 3712 words
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